From: Murray Sargent (murrays@exchange.microsoft.com)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 08:32:32 CST
Bob asks, "Does anyone know whether (or why not) it is possible to use
the ISCII Devanagari code page (57002) as the default system code page
in Windows?"
Windows does support translating between the ISCII code pages and
Unicode via the MultiByteToWideChar() and WideCharToMultiByte() system
calls. But about the time Indic support was introduced (Windows 2000),
the decision was made not to add more code pages as system code pages.
The idea was that Unicode should be used and code pages should be
supported, but deemphasized.
In general this decision has worked out well. But one way that code
pages have been very useful is that they define character sets for
writing systems. For example, text stamped with code page 932 should be
rendered for the most part with a Japanese font. In plain text such as
this email one doesn't have this information, so for international text
in general one has to resort to a complicated set of heuristics to make
good rendering choices.
Murray
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